The Trouble with Nature

A lot of people who live in the city like to visit the country to get close to nature. Then, once they are in the country, they find that they needn’t go outdoors to get close to nature. Nature comes right inside, as if to prove some kind of point.

Often, it arrives in the form of gray, nickel-size spiders that have woven their webs in the upper corners of several rooms, and then crawl up and down the walls to start a new web in another corner. Some people get a paper towel and clear away the webs and spiders, but many worry that the spiders will crawl onto their bodies, and so leave the webs and spiders alone, avoiding corners of rooms altogether.

Sometimes, there is this black thing hanging from the kitchen ceiling. It is the exact size and shape of a charcoal briquette, and you wonder what a charcoal briquette is doing up there. On closer inspection, it turns out that it is not a charcoal briquette. It’s a bat, hanging upside down, as if the kitchen ceiling, so close that you can press your palm against it, were the vaulted recesses of a cathedral, or the dark nether reaches of an old barn.

Its little body is covered in fur, which many people find distressing. This is a creature that flies, and it is as unsettling for a flying thing to have fur as it would be for a hard-boiled egg, or a rose petal, to have it.

Distressing, too, are its pointed ears, which are sticking straight up—down, actually—and are shaped just like a Chihuahua’s ears, only in miniature: tiny, perfect doggie ears, which also do not belong on a flying thing. And the black-briquette body and pointy, upside-down ears form a silhouette that instantly sears itself into many people’s memory bank of disturbing images. They know that, decades from now, when they are very old and remember nothing—not their name, not the pablum that the nurse’s aide spooned into their mouths moments earlier—they will remember that silhouette, and shiver. They may die with that silhouette, not their loved ones, as the last image playing in their ancient, broken brains.

Some people shoo the bats out the door with a section of the newspaper. Others try to go about their day and not look at the bat, leaving the kitchen door propped wide open in the hope that the bat will eventually fly out on its own. These are people who would just rather not see the bat’s wings. At the moment, the wings are folded flat against the bat’s body while it hangs there. But sooner or later, the bat will fly away and, in spite of themselves, people often get a glimpse of the wings. The wings look like they are made out of very thin, black leather—another distressing detail, like the fur. Also, the wings are webbed, like a duck’s feet, which makes some people feel like they might vomit.

Unlike bats, small birds that fly indoors by accident hardly ever find their way back outside on their own; they just keep whacking into plate-glass windows, walls, and table lamps, unable to locate the tear in the porch screen or the open window that they flew in through two minutes earlier. This futile flinging, at once heartbreaking and irksome, drives many people to get a broom and try to shoo the bird back in the direction of the tear or open window.

Only, the bird still doesn’t get it, and many people finally give up and go to bed while it continues banging around; sometimes they find its corpse on the floor in the morning, close to the torn screen, where it expired—bravely, birdbrainedly—just before finding its way to freedom. Many can feel the weight and shape of the bird’s stiff little corpse through the paper towel in which they wrap it to throw it away, and feel confused—at once mournful, guilty, and deeply repulsed.

Repellent also is something happening on the kitchen counters. One day the butter plate gets left on the counter by mistake, and when you return to the kitchen two minutes later, the stick of butter on the plate is covered with a million tiny ants—not those big, black ones; these are reddish, much smaller, and faster, even manic, covering the butter like a crawling carpet. It’s like a scene from “The Lost Weekend” or something in a Salvador Dali painting. After the butter incident, the ant attacks keep happening, day after day, swarms of them assaulting a drop of maple syrup or a bit of apple peel that has fallen onto the counter. Many people run out and buy those small containers of ant poison and set them on the counters, but that turns out to be a waste of time, as the ants swarm up, over, and past them like fleet-footed marathon runners.

People usually don’t see the mice. They just see their tiny black droppings in the morning, also on the kitchen counters. Even the most sophisticated mousetraps are a waste of money, for the mice know to avoid them. Between the mice doo-doo and the ants, many people feel that the kitchen counters are a health hazard, and long to take their meals elsewhere, at restaurants, except that the only restaurants are many miles away.

Some people think that raccoons are cute, but this is only because they have never seen one rooting through the “tamper-proof” trash cans in the garage. Raccoon paws are attenuated and thin, like human fingers, with long, tapered, manicured-looking nails, like the too-long nails of the bank teller who counted out your cash yesterday. Many people find that the human-looking paws make them want to vomit again. Nonetheless, they try bringing a radio into the garage and blasting loud music at the raccoons, which the Internet says will scare them away, but doesn’t.

At this juncture, many people take themselves upstairs to their bedroom, lie down, and stare at the ceiling, hoping that if they focus all of their thoughts and energy on the raccoons going away, maybe, maybe this will happen. While they are staring at the ceiling, they notice that the spider webs now have something suspended in them— small brown balls the size of peas. These, they realize, are egg sacs, filled with thousands upon thousands of tiny spiders yet to be born.

Some people are able not to dwell on the egg sacs and the thought of what is shortly to come out of them. But many cannot help thinking about it, and begin to consider the option of living in the out-of-doors, where creatures keep to themselves, in a bush or up a tree, and mostly out of sight—Mother Nature at her most sublime.